eed persuasion from his family. Friends in Cherbourg
urged him to come back, promised him commissions, and assured him a
place in the studio of Langlois, a painter of a higher grade than
Mouchel, who had recently set up his easel in the town. Once more
established at Cherbourg Millet continued his studies after the same
easy fashion with Langlois as with his former master. Langlois, who
was as much impressed by his pupil's talent as Mouchel had been and
willing to serve him, made a personal appeal to the mayor and council,
asking that Millet, as a promising young artist and one likely to do
credit to the town, might be assisted in going to Paris to study under
better advantages than he could enjoy at home.

On the strength of this appeal, the council of Cherbourg agreed to
allow Millet an annuity of four hundred francs, equal to eighty
dollars. With this small sum, and the addition of two hundred francs
given him at parting by his mother and grandmother, making one hundred
and twenty dollars in all, Millet left his quiet life in Normandy
behind him and set out for Paris, where, as his biographer, Sensier,
says, he was to pass as a captive the richest years of his life.

Millet was twenty-two years old when he went first to Paris and he
remained there, with occasional visits to Gruchy and Cherbourg, for
the next thirteen years. Paris was, from the first, more than
distasteful to him. He was thoroughly unhappy there. Outside the
Louvre and the studios of a few artist-friends, he found nothing that
appealed to what was deepest in him. His first experiences were
unusually bitter. The struggle with poverty was hard to bear, but
perhaps a more serious drawback was his want of an aim in art, of a
substantial reason, so to speak, for the profession he had chosen,
leading him to one false move after another in search of a subject.
Unformed and unrecognized in his mind lay the desire to express in art
the life he had left behind him in Normandy; but it was long before he
arrived at the knowledge of himself and of his true vocation. He seems
to have had no one in Paris to guide or direct him, and he rather
stumbled into the studio of Delaroche, than entered it deliberately.
He made but a brief stay there, and although he won the respect of his
master, who would willingly have retained him as pupil and assistant,
he was conscious that he learned nothing from Delaroche; and
accordingly, in company with another pupil, Marolles, who